A mob of 10,000 whites took sledgehammers to the county jailhouse
doors to get at these two young blacks accused of raping a white girl;
the girl’s uncle saved the life of a third by proclaiming the
man’s innocence. Although this was Marion, Ind., most of the
nearly 5,000 lynchings documented between Reconstruction and the late
1960s were perpetrated in the South. (Hangings, beatings and mutilations
were called the sentence of “Judge Lynch.”) Some lynching
photos were made into postcards designed to boost white supremacy,
but the tortured bodies and grotesquely happy crowds ended up revolting
as many as they scared. Today the images remind us that we have not
come as far from barbarity as we’d like to think.